Scarface: The World Is Yours •
Page 2

This generally rosy view of things continues when you're behind the wheel of a car. The A button accelerates, the C button brakes and reverses while the stick steers. Power slides are easy to pull off, and before long you're weaving in and out of traffic, shouting about "choo foggan cocko-roaches". Shooting while driving is less easy and its here that the flaws in the control start to become more of a problem. The Z button locks your view onto the nearest target, while waving the remote refines your aim and the B trigger fires. So if you want to shoot a moving target while driving you need to hold down A to drive, use the stick to steer, point the remote to aim and use another two buttons - one on each device - to shoot with any accuracy. Not impossible to master, but still a fairly clumsy approximation of a system that was far more graceful before.

When in combat on foot the controls are occasionally more hindrance than help. This is a game where multiple enemies approach from all sides, all guns blazing, and all too often Tony goes down in a hail of bullets because waving the remote, while manipulating the stick, while also hammering the B trigger to shoot, tapping up on the d-pad to reload, right and left to change weapons and the + button to crouch is simply too fiddly. I've got enormous man-fingers, and still struggled to stretch my digits up and down the remote to hit the functions I needed, when I needed them, in the middle of a shoot-out. It's easier to simply march about shooting like a loon, and hope you find a health pack to compensate for the crude approach. There are later missions - the Oakley Drive-In and protecting the VIP in the Babylon Club especially - where you'll be crying out for an old fashioned joypad in your hand.

Implementing congestion charges, the Cuban way.

And that's the crux of the matter. This sort of GTA-style control system was designed for, and evolved on, traditional joypads with twin analogue sticks and shoulder buttons. Rather than come up with something uniquely Wii, you get a simulation of a system that is an uncomfortable fit. Familiar functions have been copied across to the Wii set up but, when weighed against the paltry benefits the motion sensing brings, the cumbersome learning curve of the new control system fails to justify itself. Swinging the remote to throw punches, or to unleash high or low chainsaw attacks, just isn't as much fun as it sounds as there's precious little feeling that your moves are being replicated on-screen. All you're really doing is triggering the same animations you'd get by pressing a button, but with less consistency.

Perhaps the worst control decision is to map the activation of Blind Rage mode to a shake of the nunchuk. This takes one of the game's most vital elements and makes it feel annoyingly disconnected. With its damage-boosting and health-refilling properties, careful use of Blind Rage is essential to completing many of the tougher missions yet activating it with a shake seems foolishly hit or miss. Sometimes the game registers your shake as a flick, and gives you one of Tony's foul-mouthed taunts instead. Other times it just doesn't register your shake at all. For such a life-saving function, designed for urgent use in the thick of battle, you want the comfort of an old-fashioned button press with instant results. Having to stand there, bullets flying all around you as you frantically wobble your hands, is precisely the sort of pointless gimmick that lends more ammunition to those that scorn the Wii and its quirky potential.

Clearly, this is not a game of stealth.

But don't be too put off. Scarface is still the same almost-great game it was last year. The problems of this latest version are less to do with the Wii controls and more to do with this sort of game just not benefiting from the motion-sensing technology, yet losing some immediacy in the process. Like so many multiplatform ports, there's the inescapable image of a square peg that has only just been made to fit the Wii's round hole. The results aren't disastrous, merely frustrating on occasion. For much of the time it's a blast but, when it doesn't work how you'd hope, the frustration is tangible - and often unfairly directed at the console itself, rather than a game that has failed to evolve to fully suit its new home.

Given the drought currently afflicting the Wii, it seems churlish to completely dismiss Scarface's many amusements just because of control issues, especially as they can be accommodated with patience and practice. For the bulk of its playing time Scarface remains an indecently entertaining bad taste romp and, for those who don't have access to a PS2 or Xbox, it's still worth having. Even so, given that the handheld versions of multi-platform games are almost always radically reworked to better suit the hardware, it'd be nice to see the Wii get the same treatment once in a while.